I BELONG IN JAIL!!! IT’S A FACT!

I am not minimizing your post or trying to enable or give reassurance. With that said where would the other 95% of the people go that are continuing to do much , much worse than you , there would be no room in the jails , LOL ! Just meant as a little humor to break the tension and negative cycle a little bit.

Hey take a breath, if it helps for example I had covid a couple years back , I had a slight throat issue and thought that it was my usual throat issue it didn’t really feel any different and I was out and about in public and with loved ones and also didn’t really think about it cause I thought it was my usual issue but the next day I had much more intense symptoms that were not usual for me so I did a covid test and found that I had covid like you as well, I don’t think it’s something worth beating yourself up over for being that unkind and cruel to yourself , we’re not perfect in all of our decisions we make sometimes we’re human and to not be so hard on yourself and it’s okay 💞💛 it’s not being illogical💞💛

This post seems very familiar to me.. it sounds like myself! I had convinced myself I was a racing a couple of years ago, as OCD does, it roots in a tiny kernel of truth and spirals out of control. Everyone around me was telling me not to be so hard on myself but all I could think was “they don’t understand, they don’t see how horrible I am. I deserve to die and they only don’t think that because they are good. They don’t realize in time their lives will be better without me.” Now a few years on, though I still struggle, I see much more clearly. Continue with treatment, push through even if it’s hard, for your family and friends if not yourself. You’re not alone.

Hi. I was just looking through a book I wrote and came across these parts and remembered your post from a few days ago....I think they really relate to what you are experiencing so I wanted to share: --------------------------------------------------- Catastrophizing is “imagining the worst-case scenario of a situation and reacting to the imagined ‘catastrophe’ rather than the actual situation. Their anxiety level matches the imagined catastrophe rather than the fact that nothing has happened.” In the example above, I imagined that an innocent person had been hurt or killed retrieving an ink cartridge because I was not in God’s will to shoot photos at a basketball game. In a common example, people without OCD may wonder at some point whether they locked their door, but they do not assume that not locking the door will lead to a catastrophe 99.9% of the time, so they can easily dismiss the concern. In contrast, someone with OCD considers the ramifications of the ten worst-case scenarios that will result from their failure to lock the door, and focuses on the potential catastrophes, reacting as if they are inevitabilities. --------------------------------------------------------- Without Hypocrisy anupokritos – undissemled, that is, without dissimulation (hypocrisy), unfeigned Dissimulate means to disguise or conceal under a false appearance. We can use this description as a litmus test by asking ourselves, “Is the appearance of this thought a reflection of reality?” For example, the thought, “you will contaminate the entire city if you don’t wash your hands,” gives a false appearance. The implication is that the opposite is true—that washing your hands will prevent contamination of the city. But how will repetitively washing my hands help keep things clean when so many other factors can affect my cleanliness, the cleanliness of my surroundings, and the cleanliness of all the people and things in an entire city? The answer is that OCD almost always selects which agenda it wishes to push, implying that a problem can be solved by an action, which is usually unreasonable. In reality, there is rarely a problem at all. In this example, re-washing my hands has no effect on keeping the city uncontaminated. There are millions of other contaminants directly impacting this issue of greater significance than my handwashing. A city is flooded by germs on the ground, bacterial and viral infections in the air, and all manners of filth. Therefore, ask yourself, “Is this thought giving a false appearance of control, and second, is it presenting a nonexistent problem to begin with?” -------------------------------------------------------- You can see more about the book at WagingWarAgainstOCD.com. Full disclosure - it is written from a Christian perspective. I hope these help.

Thanks for your kind words! Where I think you are catastrophizong is in the level of risk you are attributing to what you did. Meaning this….i think most of the OCD scenarios we let wreak havoc in our minds have a literal zero percent chance of ever happening (or like a one in a billion or 1 in a trillion chance.) The difference here is that your actions moved the needle from one in a billion to like 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 100,000 chance of a terrible consequence resulting from your actions. So for example - and I’d love to hear the others on here back me up so you see the point I am making is valid - no one reading your post actually thinks you did something terribly negligent. For one - I’m not a doctor or immunologist - but the medical field has clearly lowered the threat level of COVID since it was first introduced to the population in 2019. For example: ————- The lifting of the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration on May 11, 2023 ended the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) authorization to mandate reporting of certain key data, including COVID-19 testing and incidence. ———— So the point I am making is that your OCD is making the risk of COVID in 2023 FEEL the same as it was in 2019. Many think the CDC was politicized during COVID and took a very super conservative and fear mongering approach towards the public (which I am not saying). But even they - who were trying to protect the public - loosened their stance over a year ago. Those with OCD (myself included) probably FELT the risk was greater than it was. (I am not minimizing that COVID was dangerous, simply saying that OCDers likely took the risk it to unimaginably high heights in their minds). The reason I am confident saying all this is that germ spreading is one of the most common OCD themes, possibly the most common. My book includes pages and pages of my torturous rituals in high school that I performed to prevent the spread of germs. This is where community is important - I find it refreshing to hear the objective view from people I trust that don’t have OCD - bc they can see where I’m letting OCD catastrophization take hold of my thought patterns, and tell me when a concern is a valid one.